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Psychoanalytic literature of the past 40 years appears to have given little clinical attention to the subject of Christmas. Two outstanding exceptions are articles by Eisenbud2 and Sterba,8 both written during World War II. Eisenbud presents the view that festivals in general provide a “social sanction” to enjoyments held in check at other times by individual feelings of guilt; that the Christmas-to-New-Year season is characterized by “the greatest relaxation on the part of the superego of society”; and that individual idiosyncrasies rather than the content of religious legends or rituals determine neurotic reactions to holidays. Sterba has disputed this view, arguing that emotional experiences relating to Christmas in particular are specifically determined by the content of the festival itself, as a celebration of the birth of Christ. He provides detailed analogies between typical behavior during the Christmas season and typical reactions in the course of a pregnancy and childbirth in a family. Sterba, in concluding his essay, ponders whether “Future Christmas periods may yield more material for an extensive report on the pathological reactions arising therefrom.”
No such report has emerged to date, and one must still turn to the case of Freud's most famous and controversial patient, the “Wolf Man,”3 for an intensive consideration of the clinical significance of Christmas for a particular patient. It will be recalled that the Wolf Man was so named because of his childhood nightmare, the analysis of which provided so much valuable information regarding children's reactions to primal scene experiences. The nightmare was described by the patient as follows: